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guusbosman writes "Yesterday a district court in Washington, D.C. issued its ruling in a case that boiled down to the definition of 'strictly random.' In the 2011 drawing of the U.S. 'Green Card Lottery,' a computer programming error was made and two weeks after the official drawing of the lottery the Department of State closed the website and voided the results. A lawsuit sought an injunction claiming that, while the process was not mathematically random, it was random in the dictionary definition of 'without definite aim, direction, rule or method.' The court, analyzing language from the State Department's regulations, and examples from laws on casinos and the like, rejected that and came out in favor of a mathematical definition of randomness. The lottery is voided and the results of the new drawing came out today at noon EST."

They should have, but they probably couldn't have legally--at least not easily. Even a court (as opposed to the issuing agency) doesn't have the power to overrule a Congressional statute--the only real option would have been to find a Constitutional basis for letting both sides win that overruled the statute in this instance. Maybe you could call it a due process right--if it were appealed, though, it would probably be reversed, and judges don't like to be reversed.

The only impressive thing here is that the judge (or his aides) apparently cracked open a dictionary or maybe even a math textbook to get a basic idea of what "random" means. Unfortunately, the judiciary doesn't always rule on the basis of absolute mathematical or scientific fact, when it is relevant to the case. For example, in the arson trial of a Texas man who supposedly (for no credible reason) murdered his wife and children they brought in arson 'experts' who had no scientific validity to their process at all. A Texas arson expert looks at some char marks and somehow always (whenever it is a criminal investigation) concludes "it's arson". Despite the improbability of every fire said 'expert' examines during his career being caused by a crime.

For example, in the arson trial of a Texas man who supposedly (for no credible reason) murdered his wife and children they brought in arson 'experts' who had no scientific validity to their process at all. A Texas arson expert looks at some char marks and somehow always (whenever it is a criminal investigation) concludes "it's arson". Despite the improbability of every fire said 'expert' examines during his career being caused by a crime.

Well this is surely a weighted claim if I've ever heard one. Just think about this for a moment.

Scenario 1: A building burns down. An expert comes in and calls it arson. Arson being a crime, the police investigate, find a suspect, put them on trial, and the expert is presented as a witness explaining why they think it is arson.

Scenario 2: A building burns down. An expert comes in and calls it accidental. Accidents are not crimes. There is no investigation, no suspect, and no trial for the expert to sit at and say it was not arson.

So, again... what is the likelihood an expert witness would claim a fire was arson at a trial?

Because he would investigate every scene, and ALWAYS say it was arson. Because there was no statistical or numerical way to show if a particular burnt patch ACTUALLY was arson, beyond a reasonable doubt. Because the supreme court bitchslapped it down, after the state of Texas murdered the man, and they released several other prisoners sent to prison for the same reason.

So, again... what is the likelihood an expert witness would claim a fire was arson at a trial?

You're missing the point. Of course arson investigators hired by the government are going to testify that arson occurred more often than they say it was accidental. The point is that arson investigations are often conducted by people totally unqualified to do so.

I saw the Frontline episode the OP is talking about. One of the many points it tries to bring home is that fire investigators in many states don't have

One of the many points it tries to bring home is that fire investigators in many states don't have any scientific training in how fires spread, and are more often than not just experienced fire-fighters "with a hunch". They haven't conducted scientific studies on fire, don't have degrees in science, and have little more knowledge about fire than simply having experience. Experience without theory, and rigor is little more than a series of anecdotes. Frontline showed the opinion of an ACTUAL expert (with scientific training, academic study, and experimental evidence) who said it was quite obvious that the fire was accidental if you've studied how fires happen.

You can bring in expert witnesses to say whatever you want them to say. It is the job of the defense attorney to question their conclusions, their training, their credentials. If they can't do that, then they're of no worth.

The only impressive thing here is that the judge (or his aides) apparently cracked open a dictionary or maybe even a math textbook to get a basic idea of what "random" means. Unfortunately, the judiciary doesn't always rule on the basis of absolute mathematical or scientific fact, when it is relevant to the case.

I don't get it. What's the deal with distinguishing the difference between the mathematical and dictionary definition of random? The argument that it fits the dictionary definition does not hold water.

To suggest that a process which methodically ignores eligible applications is "without definite aim, direction, rule or method" is erroneous. Excluding applicants that filed after the second day is both a method and quite definite.

The Supreme Court once ruled that a tomato was a vegetable even though it is scientifically a fruit. That case, Nix v. Hedden, dealt with a tariff on vegetables but not fruits. The government taxed tomatoes as vegetables even though they were botanically fruit. Tomato importers who had paid the taxes sued. The Supreme Court ruled that even though tomatoes were botanically fruit, the law was meant vegetables in the colloquial sense. Go for lawyers!

It wasn't that crazy, though, since the tariff was on "vegetables", which itself is not a scientific word - so applying a scientific term in the first place wasn't valid. In fact, the original definition of "vegetable" was *all* plants. That would have been a cool Supreme Court ruling...

Scientist: What do we call stuff like this?General Public: VegetablesScientist: OK.-Time passes-Scientist: Hmm. There seems to be a difference between some things in this group and other things in this group. I'll exclusively call the other things vegetables.-Time passes-Scientist: What do we call stuff like this?General Public: VegetablesScientist: You're wrong, you idiots.

Are you trying to argue that words can't have multiple meanings? Language is evolving all the time, and it's not controlled by one group of people. Context matters, and in this case the context wasn't a botanical one. People don't treat tomatoes like fruit, they treat it like a vegetable. This is legislation, not a scientific paper in botany.

I think he's talking about Cameron Todd Willingham [wikipedia.org]. The case involved a house burning down with kids inside. The mother was shopping, the father escaped alone with burns.

After the man was executed, Gov. Perry stalled the commission tasked with looking into whether the fire marshall investigating the arson had done his job properly (going so far as to restaff it when the first set of handpicked people started to look like they might not give him the answer he wanted).

The final outcome of the final commission with Gov. Perry's best hand-picked cronies was that the arson investigator used outdated techniques and terribly bad science. The commission was disbanded without considering what conclusions would have been reached by applying modern techniques to the evidence.

Of course, an adversarial system's not so hot when the government has a good prosecutor and you get stuck with a crappy public defender; don't know if that was an issue in this case, but it's a well-known problem without any real good solutions...

I think the problem in this case [wikipedia.org] was not so much with the lawyering - rather, the low quality of the evidence and testimony was not apparent until years later. (By which point the convict had already been executed, unfortunately.)

The problem was that the buggy algorithm only randomly selected entries that were submitted during the first two days that the submission system was open. The law specifies that entries are to be selected "in a random order," which implies (at least to the judge) that all of the entries must be shuffled in, and given equal probability of being chosen.

A string of numbers is never random in and of itself -- it's the method by which they are generated that is random or not. The sequence "9 9 9" is random if and only if it happens to be the output of a random function.

What you perhaps mean is that any string of numbers could have been the output of a random function. That's not strictly true, but it's close enough. You certainly can't tell just by looking at the string of numbers whether it's really the output of a random function -- though you can often ma

As a crypto geek myself, randomness means an extremely specific mathematical definition with probabilities and distributions of data, which would be better described in a dictionary as totally impossible to predict.

Arbitrary does not imply 'chance' so much as 'human discretion'. The sense of random described is in line with the larger use of the word. 'Random' is a cognate of 'run' and its use in probabilities refers to the idea of making a rushed choice. (In which cases, using a badly-cobbled together computer program seems oddly appropriate.)

The problem stated was that "The algorithm that was used only looked at submissions of the first 2 days." I am not sure exactly what they think they mean by "scientific rand

This year they also added a CAPTCHA after you've signed in for the results.So I had a little OMG moment today before the usual let down.

My wife and I have applied every year for the last 9 or so (since they went to internet based registrations). It's always been the same, nothing has changed until now.In hindsight, since I never applied in the first two weeks I was probably wasting my time all those years which is a bit of a bummer.

I probably should have just went over on an H1-B. It always seemed a bit like indentured servitude tho..

In Australia. We have a pretty high standard of living here. The reason I would like to move to the U.S. is because I'm an entrepreneur and it's nearly impossible to hire people here for speculative projects. I've did it twice before and anyone decent is 150K+. In a seed funded company that is a huge amount. Also VC exists but they are like the Merchant of Venice here. Also there are a ton of other reasons why even with U.S. litigation madness, the U.S. is still a better place to start companies. Entreprene

Yeah, it's much easier to get into Australia and Australia is just about even to the US for pay equity, and better quality of life. The UK just changed their rules a couple years ago, or that would have been easier to get in than the US and then you could go to any EU country as you wish. But now I'm not sure what their rules are, or where it would be easy for an English speaker to get into the EU.

The need of those in the US to get out while they can will not change. The likelihood of the EU being a better place than the US to live doesn't seem to be reversing, and for an American, it's likely they won't know other languages and would need to get UK citizenship before they'd be able to live and work intefinately in the rest of the EU, where they'd be able to mostly get by with English only.

At least not as far as anyone knows. This is not a scientific question, it is more of a philosophical or even a theological question. If there are deterministic physical laws governing how objects interact, then it is possible to predict anything. Realistically, no one will have the computational power to make such a prediction, so achieving randomness is really just a matter of achieving something close enough to truly random that no one can predict it.

The only way we could have true randomness is if there are some sort of measurable phenomena that cannot be predicted. Quantum mechanics dances around this question, and even if there is a state change that is genuinely random, it would be difficult bordering on heroic to measure it in a practical way so as to create a random number generator.

Actually, there are many commercial devices [wikipedia.org] that use quantum effects to generate sequences of numbers that are unpredictable even in theory. Or, if you're careful about it, you can even use a simple Geiger counter [ciphergoth.org] to generate truly random data.

Then the second problem is your assumption that physical laws "govern" how objects interact. We don't have to accept that assumption; we can assume instead that physics is a collection of predictive theories about the world, which we accept because they meet some statistical criteria.

The experiments that support your typical physical theory don't produce the exact numbers that the theories' equations predict. We don't reject the theories because

Random is demonstrable. Over a large enough sample size random numbers will have a uniform distribution. Unpredictable random phenomena can also be observed in nature. Lava lamps are one of these. When I was in high school in the 80's my Chemistry teacher demonstrated random Brownian motion by mixing two chemicals together and pointing out how the colors changed. I don't know what they're teaching kids these days. Apparently not that.

Computer science spent a fair bit of time on randomness and put it to be

Quantum mechanics does not "dance" around the question of the existence of randomness--it very explicitly predicts the probability distribution of various measurements. From that it's just a matter of some calculus to produce random numbers according to virtually any distribution you might want. Measurements of quantum mechanical effects are not terribly difficult, either. Try using a Starn-Gerlach device [wikipedia.org] to get a random stream of bits. I suppose it could be debated whether or not these results are philosop

I would stick with the photon based RNGs. The most popular ones have a light emitter that creates only one photon at a time and it shot as a prism type thing. If the photon has one polarity, it goes strait through and hits one sensor, if it has the other polarity, the photon bends and goes to the other sensor.

I can't the contradiction between predicting something, and free will. Put another way, I don't see random will as any freer than will based on past events. And those are the two choices (obviously there is a gradient between them).

I can see the contradiction if you add some omnipotent and omniscient creator entity as the one who granted free will -- that's a contradiction because that deity set up the initial conditions and knows the ult

If labor is to be restricted from freely leaving one country and coming to another, then so too should capital be restricted. If I cannot walk across the border and sell my labor where it is more highly valued, why should the business tycoon on the other side of the line be allowed to set up a factory in my country and exploit my lower standard of living and lower wages? You cannot have an ethical and just system where only one form of immigration is allowed to be effectively infinite and the other is not. The restrictions on capital moving between borders should be similar to the movement of labor. I'd prefer this to be accomplished by loosening the restrictions on the movement of labor, not by restricting capital flow. Letting capital walk the earth freely while we keep workers chained to their place of birth is one of the primary tools of the capitalist elite ruling class and the Global North countries to maintain their hegemony over all peoples. It is directly opposed to the principles of self-determination and progressive philosophy.

I'd say it is up to the receiving country. If China wanted to block all further building of factories, they certainly could. If Mexico wanted to make it illegal for poor farm workers to come to the US, they could block them. Instead, Mexico makes it illegal to enter their country without permission and only through authorized border crossings whereas the US by comparison has nearly a big sign saying WELCOME!

Absolutely, we would all be better off if China decided they didn't want the factories any longer

Every computer programmer knows that any random number he generates programmatically is not "mathematically random". The strict definition being that the program to produce the number must be longer than the number, which, of course, is impractical. Pseudorandom is really the best we can do without special hardware.

But even if we could, it is still about unpredictability. Just because you can't predict the output of an RNG, doesn't mean it will always be unpredictable. People find new patterns that may fit

Unpredictability is the key, or course. The method that was used looked at only the first two days submissions. Suppose you knew that the computer program doing the selection might have a bug, and that even if that bug were found the results would not be invalidated. You might try to take advantage of that bug by submitting in such a way that you get the benefit. You could submit very early, expecting the bug to pick up only early entries, or you might submit very late thinking it will pick up late bugs.

Every computer programmer knows that any random number he generates programmatically is not "mathematically random". The strict definition being that the program to produce the number must be longer than the number, which, of course, is impractical. Pseudorandom is really the best we can do without special hardware.

Ah, but you are so wrong. Try a google search on "entropy gathering". There are well known ways to generate truly random sequences without any "special" hardware, using environmental noise collected from device drivers and other sources. There are Linux distros whose/dev/random implementations use these techniques. On other Unixen the EGD (Entropy Gathering Daemon) provides random sequences in a similar way.

Every computer programmer knows that any random number he generates programmatically is not "mathematically random".

Perhaps very bad, or at least ignorant computer programmers think this. The good ones know about things such as "hardware random number generators", which generate random random numbers using thermal noise, which is random at the quantum level. These are built into many chipsets, and are hardly considered exotic. I've got one myself in a cheap VIA motherboard. QM could be wrong of course, anything in science can be. If you think you can predict thermal noise, or some other quantum phenomenon, I guarantee there's a nobel prize in it for you if you're correct. If you're really holding out for that without any evidence to support it, then the conversation is essentially over.

We can possibly debate on whether other sources of randomness (keyboard timings, network latency packets, etc) are truly unpredictable. That's not something I have any special knowledge of. But you're quite wrong if you think that nothing is truly random. Our current theories about how the universe works would say that the lowest level of everything IS random and unpredictable.

To be fair, the GP did say random numbers generated "programmatically" aren't strictly random. Maybe they meant to discount hardware random number generation this way. It's unclear where eg. keyboard input lies, then. Perhaps they meant something like "a fixed Turing machine given as input only how many random integers in a fixed range it should produce--call it n--will only give pseudorandom ones for sufficiently large n".

Back in pre-online application days, Green Card lottery used to be pretty much a sure shot for anyone with half a brain and ability to follow basic instructions.They had no real form to fill, but rather a set of fairly simple and specific guidelines. You had to use a plain piece of paper, and write in order (numbered or not) your name, date of birth, mailing address, a few other items I now forget. You needed to attach a photo of specific size (with a staple, in the top right corner of the page). You had to

(not from the US) I though all this "Green card lottery" stuff was just some satirical comment on the US immigration process, turned into banner text by unscrupulous scammers trying to steal money from unsuspecting foreigners. Which retard thought that a lottery would be a good idea?

I was curious so wanted to check the diversity lottery website (http://dvlottery.state.gov/ [state.gov]) and encountered this statement: "This web site only supports Internet Explorer 6.0 and Internet Explorer 7.0.". I guess if you want to take part in the diversity lottery you have to do away with some of your freedoms to make use of say Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox or Safari.Somehow the term "diversity" does not seem to cover that bit:) Makes you also wonder who is the target audience for this lottery.

It's pretty obvious that it wasn't a question of logic and reason, it was a question of fairness - either every applicant had an equal opportunity to be selected, or they didn't. As first run, the lottery didn't provide that, which is why they voided the results in the first place, and why the court agreed with them.

No. Accepting both groups is not "more fair", it's still skewed. All they originally purported to offer was an equal opportunity to be selected. They found that they hadn't provided that, so they voided the results and tried again, this time ensuring that every applicant had an equal probability of being selected.

You won. They notified you that you won. Then they notified you "oops." That's unfair. The question is, which unfair do you follow through with, the one that hurts people, or the one that helps people. They chose to hurt people. You agree with them.

People wait an awful long time for this, sure, but they often start making plans as soon as they find out that they won. They want to come here, badly. Badly enough to take new pictures and jump through the sumbissions process each year. Within a few days, people are making arrangements, buying plane tickets, giving things away...

Don't discount how much this sucked for those who had their yes turned into a no.

Granted, I talked with someone who was worried that now her brother was going to come to the sta

They made a decision. They told people they had been approved. They then changed their minds. Whether the first selection was fair, whether the first results were valid, does not change the fact that the treatment of those who won the first round was unfair. It's sad when process is more important than people.

The system broke. The process was invalid. So, do you harm people to "protect" the process, or do you state "we made an error, and we are going to fix this by allowing in those notified they were approved, as well as re-holding the selection to be fair to everyone else." That's the the most fair way I see to handle it, and it isn't even something they appeared to consider.

It just seems silly to me to defend the process so strongly when it's proven it was broken.

Reversing the lottery was unfair to the tiny fraction who were selected. Not reversing it would have been unfair to the huge majority (as TFA says, the bug was that only the first 2 of 30 days worth submissions were considered). So, statistically this was by far the better solution to be *fair* to the most people.

This wasn't a TV call-in prize, it was an act of Congress that allowed 50,000 visas awarded randomly among ALL applicants. Hence the Supreme Court decision, which was only concerned with following the law.

When election results are screwed up, they do a recount, they don't feel bad for the guy they mistakenly declared the winner and give him an extra position. Sometimes it sucks, but the law just isn't about making people feel better...

#1 - it is unfair to allow one group (the ones who were in the "heightened chance" of the faulty selection process) to have more than one chance to get in.#2 - it is unfair to deny another group (the ones from the other 28 days' worth of submissions) an EQUAL chance at selection.#3 - it is unfair to those from other years, who were each given EQUAL chances in each year, to provide a different standard for

Purely statistically (where "unfair" = "not the same odds") you are correct. But it's all irrelevant because the entire thing was a specific Act with *2* requirements: 1) 50,000 visas and 2) "strictly random". Given both those legal requirements, there really wasn't any other choice the Court could make anyway.

Reversing the lottery was unfair to the tiny fraction who were selected. Not reversing it would have been unfair to the huge majority (as TFA says, the bug was that only the first 2 of 30 days worth submissions were considered). So, statistically this was by far the better solution to be *fair* to the most people.

The right solution has nothing to with math and everything to do with keeping our promises.

The right solution would be to honor the results of the first lottery run and then run the lottery again to give everyone else a fair chance. The people who were told they won the lottery didn't do anything wrong - we lied to them. We need to honor our word, not pawn off the responsibility by blaming "computer error."

Many of the people who received notification of winning the lottery made irrevocable changes like se

Probably not, but given that it would have had to go through Congress to amend the law that allowed it, the probable result (especially considering the Republicans now control the House) would have been that no one gets in...

There comes a time when an error can not (or should not) be reversed. Assume they look back at the previous years and noticed the same problem. Would it be "reasonable" to revoke the immigration status of all of them? If not, why not? If you agree with me that there is some time after which the initial problem could not or should not be "fixed" then, it just becomes a discussion of when.

A random choice that is limited to a particular subset is NOT random for the entire set.

Yes and no.

In this case, only applicants from the first 2 days of the application time were considered by the random selector. This clearly unfair, because its quite easy to predict and even control whether you are eligible to get picked.

However if the error was something more esoteric, like every 5th applicant was not considered by the random number generator, (and we recognize that this is an online system not a phsyic

A judgment is a subjective thing; a matter of opinion. A study that determines something factual is not subjective. Therefore, if your metric for saying something is racist requires that it be a subjective judgment, a study confirming something about a racial class that differentiates it from another racial class isn't racist.

It still is. If black people are taller on average than whites, then assuming a black person would be taller than a white person when you've seen neither is racism. It doesn't matter if it's true or pejorative.

"Racist" is almost universally agreed to mean something that is a pejorative based on racial classification.

And prejudice indicates a pejorative prejudgment. However, neither require negative connotations to be correct, and there is no other word for either that doesn't also indicate pejorative. As such, without a replacement word, they retain both the original non-pejorative as well as the current pejo

However, there is no biologist out there with any credibility who can simply say that human ideas and mental performance and behavior are divorced from our genes.

Quite true. However, there are credible biologists who will simply state that human mental performance is divorced from race. The last time I checked, it was all of them. No credible geneticist believes that mental performance is tied to race.

Please, please cite your legitimate sources that say that Asian genes are superior. I assure you, I am in the process of digging up my own.

I didn't say they were superior. They are following a different R strategy which is why they have higher intelligence on average, smaller physical size, longer maturation periods, less sex, and take lower risks. These are all known facts that are both backed up by hundreds of studies and are fucking obvious.

Mother nature determines who is superior, and obviously intelligence is only one factor.

"Intelligence quotient (IQ) tests performed in the United States have consistently demonstrated a significant degree of variation between different racial groups, with the average score of the African American population being lowerâ"and that of the Asian American population being higherâ"than that of the European-American population. At the same time, there is considerable overlap between these group scores, and individuals of each group can be fo

People generally get their ideas about race from personal experience, and personal experience is often skewed. If you were white and grew up in the ghettos of Detroit, you might get into your head that blacks have a proclivity towards crime, because many of them commit crimes there. However, this would be subject to selective attention, because in fact many of the whites and many people of every other ethnic group are also commiting crimes there. I'm not even trying to be politically correct here. The fact is that the vast majority of negative things that people attribute to blacks (in particular, but also various latin groups as well here in the US) are NOT a function of race but instead a function of SOCIAL CLASS. (Or perhaps other related things like socioeconomic status, etc.) Even if there is some effect of race on behavior (although what it is is probably 100% neutral), it is FAR overshadowed by the effects of class. The main differences between lower-class blacks and lower-class whites (e.g. trailor trash) are minor cultural things that have only superficial effects on their lack of social graces, education, values, and other things (as they are perceived by people of middle and upper classes). Now, it may be, due to residual effects of slavery or any number of other reasons, that a greater proportion of blacks in the US are lower class, but there ARE plenty of upper-class blacks, and they're no different from the upper-class whites. Dave Chappelle even did a show on this, where each ethic group got to recruit people, and the whites wanted Tiger Woods, and the blacks wanted Eminem. Being "black", culturally and dialectically, is so much a function of where and how you grew up that any effects of race (insofar as there is any such thing) completely disappear into the statistical noise.

I was reading somewhere about the IQ differences between caucasians, Africans, and Asians. IIRC, Asians tested slightly high, Africans slightly low, and caucasians in the middle. However, the variance was HUGE compared to the differences in mean. The overlap between races was far greater than the differences. It's hard to infer anything useful from these minor differences. However, the fact that one average may be slightly different from the other MAY indicate some differences due to genetics, but we have to keep in mind that (at the risk again of sounding P.C.) no one race is superior, but in fact, we're all superior in the context of how we are adapted to the environment we evolved in. There are some differences in environment between sub-saharan Africa and northern Europe, with the most obvious thing being skin tone. More sun requires more protection against UV rays, or else you get skin cancer. Less sun requires less protection against UV, or else you'll suffer vitamin D deficiencies, which lead to birth defects, among other things. Well, sun isn't the only environmental difference, and there are of course random mutations that differ between geographically divergent groups, or else natural selection couldn't have selected for skin color in the first place. One thing I have noticed, subject of course to observation bias, is that although I am white, I have a _slightly_ easier time connecting socially with blacks, particularly strangers. (Of course, there could just as well be something I'M doing that might explain this better than race or culture or whatever.) But in fact, sociologists have documented studies of low-IQ children and found that while a 70 IQ white kid will typically be socially retarded, a 70 IQ black kid will be socially normal. (I don't recall if the number they mentioned was actually 70, but you get the idea.) Among other things, there may be some suggestion that Africans have evolved slightly superior social intelligence. IQ doesn't measure social intelligence, and the human brain has tradeoffs, where all of our talents must fit within some total capacity. If some capability is greater, then generally some other capability is reduced. Personality theories like Myers-Briggs at

You are a racist. You identify traits by race and use them to judge all of those people. There is no justifications you can add that will invalidate that racism. If you really believed in genetics, you would be interested in letting in "brown people" who passed some tests. That way we'd get the best genetics from all. But you are just a bigot who claims genetics without racism without understanding genetics or racism.

The big flaw is that raw intelligence is only a very small part of being successful. Hard work, thriftiness, ability to see what products are marketable, ect all lead to success. The reason the USA is so successful is our liberty. People are allowed to try lots of things and fail and try other things until they find their niche. Failure is one of the most important success factors in an economy and biology. Evolution isn't what creates new traits. They are being created all of the time by genetic randomne

the best evidence available shows that Asians have the greatest intelligence on average of any race of people.

You have no clue what you're talking about.

I take it you live in the USA? The set of Asians who live in the USA is a very very biased and unrepresentative sample of the set of all Asians. The US immigration system is designed to select the best and brightest immigrants. That's why the Asians in the US are so smart and hard-working. The average Asian from an Asian country would be nothing special in America. But Asian Americans as a group are taken from the top 0.5% of all Asians, because US immigration l

Well, I see I'm a little late to the party that ShooterNeo (ugh) is throwing here... and I think someone has always pointed out the idiocy of the idea of the US being made of "good genes" that will get diluted if we let "brown people" in (after all, the US as we think of it today is a result of years of immigration/contribbutions by those very same brown/yellow/whatevs people)... and anyone who has studied the history of the IQ test knows that it is a culturally biased clusterf*ck... so I guess the real question is:

I'm thinking that ALL previous algorithm runs were skewed and they only discovered that this year after the first run.

No, it was a new program for this year:From the decision:

The State Department used a new randomizer program for the 2012 DV lottery, which turned out to include an error in the process that âoerendered the Randomizer Program ineffective.â Instead of directing the computer to select the winners as they had been re-ordered and randomized in step two, the computer simply selected the

Also, isn't int true that the order in which the applicants were filed was completely random?

The point is really more that the applicants can't be predicted with any certainty, and no "favoritism" exists in the system. This is to promote fairness to everyone. Given the system of "the people who applied in the first 2 days are far more likely to get picked than anyone else" If you have a faster internet connection than me, or happen to have one or both of those days off work when the pool opens, or a dozen